All hail the Queen!

They Queen has arrived. All rise.

Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota)

day 2

As it sometimes happen, Day 2 of my recovery from oral surgery has been more painful than Day 1. Perhaps on Day 1 the brain and body are still in shock, trying to make sense of what happened. By Day 2, they understand the magnitude and scope and of the violation, and are saying, in anger “WTF, man? This HURTS!” Anyway, I am feeling puny and spent a big part of the afternoon curled up in bed reading David Sedaris. I wish I would gve mysef permission to this more often when I am not sick, because it is a delicious luxury.

Here is the familiar version of yesterday’s defamiliarized image.

wild foxtail barley grass

defamiliarization

One of the things I enjoy doing here on STILL is presenting familiar subjects in an unfamiliar way in order to help you resee the beauty of nature. Just a little reminder of the magnificence of this place we all call home. When I do workshops on The Art of Noticing, I sometimes refer to this as learning to see below the ordinary to the infra-ordinary: Learning to resee the things we have become so habituated to, that we actually stop noticing them at all. Recently, I heard an author being interviewed and he used the term defamiliarization, and I thought “That’s it! That’s exactly what I try to do!”, defamiliarize the subject so you can see it anew, as if for the first time. Case in point, this photo of foxtail barley seedheads.

wild foxtail barley seedheads (Hordeum jubatum)

dental day

I had major dental work done today: a new root canal on the left (#14), and oral surgery to repair a problematic root canal on the right (#30). So this is all I got for you today.
As the saying goes–“You get what you get and you dan’t make fit.”

white pine with new and old pine cones (Pinus strobus)

Time for more Tylenol 3. See you tomorrow.
xoxo Mary Jo

here, there, everywhere

Yesterday’s wild bee balm bloomed in my kitchen.

We have bees. We don’t do the beekeeping, the U of M does the beekeeping. We are one of their field research sites. We’ve been doing this with them for about 12 years or so. We get the honey, they do what they want with the hive, collect data, and keep us graciously in the loop. Their method for keeping the whole system living over our harsh northern winters involves a two hive system where queens and colonies are swapped back and forth as needed to keep everyone alive and thriving. It is only July 13, and our hives are taller than I have ever seen them in the whole time we have had bees. Each time the bees fill a box with honey, the beekeepers will add a “super” to the hive. Usually by this time in summer, the hive will be the two bases boxes, and 1-2 additional supers–so each hive is maybe 4 boxes tall. Right now, we have a hive that is 8 boxes tall! It looks like a skyscraper, and it is only JULY! And the bee balm only bloomed yesterday and the goldenrod is a whole month away. If the hive gets much taller it will become tippy, so I am guessing the U of M beekeepers will actually start taking boxes to the extraction lab soon. Three cheers for happy honey bees!

wild bee balm (wild bergamot)